In Min-Zhan Lu’s piece From Silence to Words: Writing as Struggle, she talks about her struggles with the use of language in different situations and her family’s struggles during the Cultural Revolution. She tried hard to distinguish her “language of home” and her “language of school”. Lu’s report in school particularly showed the wedge she drove between her two languages. Lu goes on to tell that even her daughter faces a struggle that is a bit more toned down. “ Not long ago, my daughter told me that it bothered her to hear her friend “talk wrong.”” Lu’s daughter had heard her friends and some teachers speaking improperly by saying words like “ain’t”. The daughter’s struggle is smaller in comparison to what her mother went through having to distinguish between her two languages.
I feel that the part where Lu talks about her “language of home” and her “language of school” is very similar to when Barbara Mellix talks about the two different types of english that she speaks at home versus at school. Both of these writers have to distinguish between the language that they are comfortable with and the language they use outside the house.
I can connect to Lu’s piece because of my many years of having taken Italian courses. While I can not speak Italian fluently, I can make small talk and have simple conversations. When I traveled to Italy, I noticed that many people speak english or they speak italian with a different dialect than I was taught. When having a conversation with someone over there, I could not make out much of what he was talking about. I felt very uncomfortable just as Mellix did when having to speak proper english. I also felt that I could relate to Lu’s struggles in differentiation of language because of the amount of times during Italian class that I needed to speak english to ask for confirmation of something. While I did not have difficulties differentiating, I still felt that it was not correct to use english in that class.
E367: Writing and Diversity 